eBookPartnership Blog

Picture books on Kindle Fire

Amazon have announced that the launch of the Kindle Fire tablet will be the catalyst for the introduction of a new Kindle eBook format – Kindle Format 8 (KF8). KF8 is great news for authors and publishers of books with high graphic content, such as children’s picture books, comics and graphics novels, cook books and other titles that contain lots of of non-text elements such as tables and graphs.

The new KF8 format will allow Kindle eBooks to include the following:

Fixed layout – position text and images anywhere on the page

Text positioned over background images

Floated elements – images or text boxes positioned to the left or right of other elements

Embedded fonts – a greater choice of fonts

Drop caps – add style to the start of each chapter of your book

KF8 will replace the existing Kindle format (Mobi) and will be the default format on Amazon’s Kindle Fire colour tablet. KF8 will also be rolled out to Amazon’s latest e-ink devices such as the Kindle Touch and Kindle Keyboard over the coming months, as well as all Amazon’s free Kindle apps such as the Kindle for iPad app and Kindle Cloud Reader.

Existing Kindle books (Mobi format) will still work on all new Kindle devices, so there is no need to have your existing eBooks recreated unless you want to take advantage of the additional layout features.

Amazon are yet to distribute the new Kindle Publishing guidelines or open the door to the new KF8 files being uploaded via Kindle Direct Publishing, but this is likely to happen within the next month or so.

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2 Responses

Hi Lang,
The Kindle Fire does support fixed-layout design using the new KF8 format. The technical specifications for this format have not yet been released but, so far, I have not seen anything to imply that it will support a read-aloud feature. You can install a text-to-talk feature on the Kindle Fire, but this isn’t the same as adding a specifically recorded narration of the book.
I hope that helps.